Scope Reviews and Comparisons

Pierre Vandevennne wrote:
My point is that, unless we have a differente understanding of the word,
they _were_ solicited

You probably do have a different understanding of the word. In academic
circles, the term "invited paper" is often used to mean what others have
meant by "solicited."

Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt

I (Brian Tung) wrote:
You probably do have a different understanding of the word. In
academic circles, the term "invited paper" is often used to mean what
others have meant by "solicited."

Pierre Vandevennne wrote:
Do you imply and CN belongs to those academic circles?

I'm pretty confused. Where on earth did you get that impression?

I merely say that in academic circles, the term "invited paper" is used
unambiguously to refer to a paper which the selection committee has
specifically requested (as opposed to "we are accepting submissions of
papers on intrusion detection"). I suggest that such a term could
be used outside academic circles to avoid ambiguity in those domains.
I certainly don't mean to imply that Cloudy Nights is in the academic
domain.

Anyway, educate me, is the following statement true or false?

"Alister/CN solicited reviews from the amateur astronomer community"

Since the target of the solicitation is "the amateur astronomer community,"
what is meant is evidently "Allister sent out a call for reviews to the
amateur astronomer community." (I prefer this wording to the original,
by the way.)

The problem arises when one refers to a specific review by Joe Blow and
calls it a "solicited review." In some sense, I suppose the review was
solicited if it was submitted in response to a call for proposals, since
such a call is a kind of solicitation. But it is ambiguous because many
people do use the term to mean a review or paper specifically asked for
by the editor (or whomever).

Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt

Pierre Vandevenne posted:

Improving the CN quality level is a good thing, the quality of the lab
reports is way above most of the owner's reviews, but the term
"unsolicited" makes it sound as if, in the future, those reviews will not
be welcome and almost as if they were unwanted in the past which is
inaccurate.

By unsolicited, I meant that these reviews are not specifically requested for
a specific item from a specific reviewer, but are submitted by those who were
not contacted by Cloudynights directly, but who wish to do some kind of
article on an item which they feel might be of use (I have a number of these
articles on the site as well). Perhaps "open-submission" would be a better
term, as Cloudynights welcomes these articles without having the writer having
to meet any sort of requirements (other than at least some civility). Some of
these submissions are not all that consistent in their quality or depth (and
some aren't really reviews at all), but they can be at least interesting to
read. Early on, Cloudynights attempted a sort of "screening" with their
"peer-review" articles, which eventually evolved into the current Cloudynights
Reports articles about specific items requested to be reviewed by certain
authors whose previous work was fairly well established. Clear skies to you.
--
David W. Knisely
Prairie Astronomy Club: http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org
Hyde Memorial Observatory: http://www.hydeobservatory.info/

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In article , Dennis Woos
wrote:

I mean Steve Edberg.

At least you didn't say Ed Steveburg.

--
Joe Bergeron

http://www.joebergeron.com